Still Crazy: Ten Years of the Exploding Hearts

The week that three members of Portland’s Exploding Hearts died in a car crash, I had planned to pick up two Stiff Records t-shirts at Norman’s Sound and Vision in New York: one for myself, and one for Hearts singer Adam “Baby” Cox. I grew up obsessively listening to my dad’s copy of the Stiff compilation Heroes & Cowards, and I saw that shirt in the window of Norman’s hundreds of times. But it wasn’t until I met Adam in the spring of 2003 that I put those two things together and got really excited about it.

I always feel a little weird mentioning that, as if I’m overstating my proximity to tragedy, or turning a simple coincidence of timing into “it really makes you think” faux-synchronicity. But what I remember about the Exploding Hearts is how excited they made me, both about their music and about the music that they loved. The Exploding Hearts fundamentally got both the artistry and the energy behind the best pop and punk music of the last half-century. They channeled it so well that it was easy to miss just how much was actually going on, how many perfect little decisions were made in each of their songs.

At first glance, Adam, bassist Matt Fitzgerald, drummer Jeremy Gage and guitarist Terry Six, could have been characters on a Saturday morning cartoon show about a punk band: all white jeans, leather jackets, bleached hair, and weather-agnostic sunglasses. It was easy to write them off. They were almost daring you to write them off. And, by all accounts, plenty of folks in their native Portland were initially more than happy to do so.

That is, of course, until those people actually heard the Exploding Hearts. MP3s ripped from a limited German vinyl release had already been making the rounds among punk and power-pop aficionados when Dirtnap Records officially put out the band’s debut, Guitar Romantic, in March of 2003. That momentum only seemed to multiply in the following months, and before long it seemed a foregone conclusion that the Exploding Hearts were going to be big. In a logical next step that would, in fact, have made perfect sense on a Saturday morning cartoon show about a punk band, the Exploding Hearts set out for San Francisco that July to meet with Lookout! Records, the Berkeley-based label that had launched Green Day’s career a decade earlier. On their way back to Portland, the band’s van flipped over on I-5, killing Adam, Matt, and Jeremy. Adam was 23, Matt was 20, and Jeremy was 21.

For all the complicated feelings attached to it, Guitar Romantic still makes me more excited than sad. When the posthumous singles compilation Shattered was released in 2006, I hadn’t stopped listening to Guitar Romantic. Seven years later, I haven’t stopped listening to either. For all the ostensible simplicity of the band’s music I am still discovering new things to love about these songs. In that spirit, I’d like to share my 10 favorite moments from the Exploding Hearts’ all-too-brief body of work. (Listen along to Guitar Romantic on Spotify.)

01. The opening chords of “Modern Kicks”

The first seconds of Guitar Romantic set the stage for an album that is both humble and hubristic. Even if you’ve never heard “Modern Kicks”, those opening chords sound familiar. If you’ve ever picked up an electric guitar, you’ve probably played these chords in this order, hit that slide up from an open E chord to a barred B chord and felt like you’re suddenly driving a top-down convertible to somewhere unspeakably awesome. But you didn’t turn it into a song. And you certainly didn’t turn it into this song.

02. The little guitar riff after the line “it didn’t hurt you told all my friends I’m a retard” in “Sleeping Aides and Razorblades”

The Exploding Hearts were a generous band. It’s easy to take up the “bratty” signifiers of punk as an excuse to be perpetually obnoxious and disaffected, but this band valued earnestness and good humor over irony and distance. They weren’t afraid to look dumb or sound ridiculous. This little guitar lick sounds like it could be part of an old radio jingle. It’s absurd. Every time I hear it, I scrunch up my face and do a little air-guitar dance. And then I smile for a long time.

The riff works particularly well because the band has actually trained you to expect it with a call-and-response vocal in the previous line. There are lots of subtle vocal doubling and arrangement cues on Guitar Romantic that help create exactly the right place for every line to land. The Exploding Hearts could certainly be over-the-top in both appearance and approach, there’s a lot of strategy in these songs. You sometimes can’t hear it over the exuberance of their performance. That is what makes it strategy.

03. The line “I’ve been missing from home since the age of 10/ $100 reward, I think I’ll turn myself in” in “Boulevard Trash”

The reward is only $100... for a dude who’s been missing from home since the age of 10! These are smart lyrics that sound dumb, and I’m still catching up with them. The instruments for Guitar Romantic were all recorded separately, and the drum fill around 1:14 is one of very, very few places on the record where you can actually hear it. This may be the only part of the whole album where the guitar feels even remotely tentative, where you can tell that Terry is trying to play along with the drums while keeping his own part consistent. The whole thing almost flies apart... which only makes it more powerful when the song promptly snaps right back into place.

Every time I hear the little riff in "Sleeping Aides and Razorblaes",
I scrunch up my face and do a little air-guitar dance.
And then I smile for a long time.

04. The impossible-to-pinpoint moment towards the end of “I’m a Pretender” when the song hits its stride

“I’m a Pretender” is one of the songs that Louisiana musician and former Hearts member “King” Louie Bankston brought to the band, and they approach it almost like a cover. The initial guitar part is perfectly executed, but after that the band can’t quite seem to get a handle on the song’s feel. Those snare hits blankly accelerate forward, and then the whole band just lays into it because what else are you going to do if you’re the Exploding Hearts? “I’m a Pretender” is the song on the record that probably calls for the most self-aware nuance, and the band just bulldozes it: no looking back, no hedging. By the time that last “I’m a pretender/ Said love pretender!” comes around, the band has transformed the song through sheer force of will. You can’t imagine it existing apart from these exact people playing it this exact way.

05. The acoustic guitar intro of “Jailbird”

Depending on how you read its opening pronouns, this song is either written from the perspective of a guy who’s sniffing a ton of glue to keep up with a girl he likes, or a dude who had to sniff a lot of glue because he saw the girl he likes with another guy. At one point, the girl in question apparently gets so high that she talks to-- and then kisses-- a squirrel. As if to emphasize that he is talking about an actual squirrel, not a squirrelly dude, Adam implores, “kissing its lips -- why not mine?”

I picked the acoustic guitar intro here because it’s still one of the first things I play whenever I pick up a new guitar. Sometimes it will take me a few minutes to remember what song it is; at this point, it’s all muscle memory. It was years before I noticed that the opening acoustic guitar theme comes back later in the song, played on a bell-clear 12-string electric guitar. That same 12-string guitar plays the most expertly constructed solo on the whole album... which is immediately followed by gross, exaggerated glue sniffing noises.

06. The fact that the intro to “Busy Signals” sounds a lot like Joe Jackson's “Is She Really Going Out With Him?”

I had the enormous pleasure of seeing the Exploding Hearts play a show at the basement of the Harvard Lampoon a few months after Guitar Romantic came out. Towards the end of their set, Adam asked, “OK, do you guys want to hear a Stiff Little Fingers song or a Nick Lowe song?” That was the moment when it really clicked for me that these guys knew exactly what they were doing.

07. The call-and-response guitars in the break of “Thorns in Roses”

Mixing a record with hard-panned rhythm and lead guitars is risky business. It is so easy for things to fall out of balance, for the whole mix to feel like it’s teetering over to one side. When it’s done well, though, you can actually see two guys standing next to each other. When it’s done really well, you can see which guy is also singing, and which guy is not singing but is probably a little bit better at playing guitar. Terry recorded most of the guitars on Guitar Romantic, but when I hear this volley of call-and-response chords, I see Terry and Adam standing next to each other, having the most fun two people can have playing music together.

08. The ascending coda of “Rumours in Town”

There are loads of tricky, energetic moves in this song. The intro is deceptively smooth, held together by Louie’s organ-as-song-glue. Before you can get too comfortable, though, things cut off abruptly and careen into a verse. The coda twists the song’s chorus into an ever-ascending M.C. Escher staircase that leads, apparently, to a sped-up Chuck Berry solo. It is no small feat that this all seems totally obvious when you’re actually listening to it.

Adam Cox's voice was equal parts needy and knowing,
a balance more often struck by female pop singers
than by dudes in punk rock bands.

09. The guitar line throughout “Throwaway Style”

There’s a whole cycle of tension and release packed into this little guitar line, to the point where you actually miss it when it’s gone. Which is a pretty good trick for a song about heartbreak and loss. This guitar part repeats through the song’s narrative verse, and departs just in time for the lead-in to the more metaphorical chorus. And then, there it is again, just in time for the second half of the chorus: “I know our love is over/ Unless you come over/ And make it right.”

When Cox was laying down vocals for Guitar Romantic, producer Pat Kearns told him, “less punk, more Diana!” Sure enough, Adam was able to find a voice that’s equal parts needy and knowing, a balance more often struck by female pop singers than by dudes in punk rock bands. On this song, Adam’s voice is particularly sweet and expressive, all raw and exposed nerves amidst finger snaps and Stray Cats bass. It’s melodramatic but irresistible, like Jeff Buckley mediating a fight between the Sharks and the Jets, where everybody just winds up crying and making out.

10. The bass line in “(Making) Teenage Faces”

One of the worst questions you ask when reevaluating an album like Guitar Romantic is, “Would this album seem as big a deal if most of the band were still alive?” It mega-sucks to admit that the answer is usually “no”; this band was just starting out, their best work was probably ahead of them, and this is all we have to stand in for what they were and what they could have been.

To my ears, “(Making) Teenage Faces” sounds like the band the Exploding Hearts were ready to become. This is their crispest recording, and the one where Matt’s bass is given the most room to propel the mix forward. When I think back to when I saw the band play live, this is what I hear. It is their smartest and their dumbest song. It has the world’s most gratuitous modulation, and completely rips-off the ending of Elvis Costello’s “Radio Radio”. It is their most instructive song as well as a day-glo rewrite of Alice Cooper's “School’s Out”. Perfect.